Quote

One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's left when you've failed at everything else.

Diane Setterfield

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Diane Setterfield
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: August 22
Author
Writer
Contrary
Talent
Particular
Nice
Left
Else
Everything
Polite
Needs
Failed

More quotes by Diane Setterfield

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All children mythologise their birth. It is a universal trait. You want to know someone? Heart, mind and soul? Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won’t be the truth: it will be a story. And nothing is more telling than a story.
Diane Setterfield
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Once upon a time there was a fairy godmother, but the rest of the time there was none. This story is about one of those other times.
Diane Setterfield
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But silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. Without them they grown pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you.
Diane Setterfield
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I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Books are for me, it must be said, the most important thing.
Diane Setterfield
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A birth is not really a beginning. Our lives at the start are not really our own but only the continuation of someone else's story.
Diane Setterfield
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There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic.
Diane Setterfield
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As for you, you are alive. But it's not the same as living.
Diane Setterfield
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What better way to get to know someone than through her choice and treatment of books?
Diane Setterfield
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opening the book, i inhaled. the smell of old books, so sharp, so dry you can taste it.
Diane Setterfield
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Sometimes you can know things. Things about yourself. Things from before you can remember.
Diane Setterfield
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Fate, at first so amenable, so reasonable, so open to negotiation, ends up by exacting a cruel revenge for happiness.
Diane Setterfield
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The tears I gratified him with were fake ones. Ones that set off my green eyes the way diamonds set off emeralds. And it worked. If you dazzled a man with green eyes, he will be so hypnotized that he won’t notice there is someone inside the eyes spying on him. – Vida Winters Page 268
Diane Setterfield
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A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.
Diane Setterfield
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My genius is not so frail a thing that it cowers from the dirty fingers of newspapernen.
Diane Setterfield
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For it must be very lonely being dead.
Diane Setterfield
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She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.
Diane Setterfield
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There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime you have to draw the line somewhere.
Diane Setterfield
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In this cruel world kindness should always be repaid.
Diane Setterfield
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I know there are people who don't read fiction at all, and I find it hard to understand how they can bear to be inside the same head all the time.
Diane Setterfield
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There are cultures in which it is believed that a name contains all a persons mystical power. That a name should be known only to God and to the person who holds it and to very few privileged others. To pronounce such a name either ones own or someone else's is to invite jeopardy. This it seemed was such a name.
Diane Setterfield